The Silent Dolls Rita Herron
Rita Herron is a new author to me, but she shot straight to the top of my list of must read authors after reading this book.
But it was so nearly a different story. The first chapter in this book sets a scene that makes it seem like this book is going to be like a rural Lethal Weapon with the main character being a female Riggs. How wrong was I.
Thank god I went past that chapter because this turned out to be the best US crime book I’ve read for a very long time.
If you like CJ Box and his Joe Pickett books for their settings you’ll love this book, set in the woods and mountains of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia
The main character, Detective Ellie Reeves, is scared of the dark. Why? Because she got lost in the woods on the Appalachian Trail when she was very young.
Now she’s a detective in Bluff County, the home of the starting point for the trail. So when a little girl goes missing it’s up to Ellie to look for her. What she uncovers during the investigation will send ripples all along the trail, and will have consequences close to home.
The girl that goes missing is not the first, but because the perpetrator has been moving along the trail nobody has put together the spasmodic disappearance of young girls in different jurisdictions, and it takes FBI agent Derrick Fox to highlight the link to Ellie.
The problem is Fox thinks two people close to Ellie, her father and a close friend, might be prime suspects.
This is a great story, set in rural, small town, America. It has everything to combine a great crime thriller with an great psychological thriller. A hunt for a missing child in the wild landscape is made harder by the approach of an in coming winter storm, a brilliant use of the occasional local radio weather reports really adds to the tension.
Ellie is a great character, amongst a cast of equally good bit part players, who hopefully will make appearances in future books.
Will there be future books, I hope so. This is billed as the first in a series, and it does end on a hell of a cliff hanger.
Pages: 366
Publishers: Bookouture
Publishing date U.K. 17th July 2020
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